When academician and literary historian Professor N.S. Gundur began thinking about Kannada texts that readers beyond the Kannada world should read, he started by making a list of books. “I ended up deleting most of the titles because they largely spoke to Kannada audience,” says Gundur, one of the three recipients of the first edition of the New India Foundation (NIF) Translation Fellowship, which seeks to bring knowledge texts from various Indian languages to English.
One text, however, stayed on the list: DR Nagaraj’s Allamaprabhu Mattu Shaive Pratibhe, a book posthumously published in 1999. “Its reach is cosmopolitan, but it is written in Kannada,“ he says of the text, which focuses on the life and teachings of the 12th-century poet and mystic Allama Prabhu, a key figure in Karnataka’s revolutionary Vachana movement. “The book is a radical reading of the vachanas,” he says. The Vachanas were a product of a literary and social movement that, at once, broke away from several literary and social conventions of the day.
